Entry tags:

fic, jared/jensen, rps

FIC: Lingering in the Golden Gleam (2/3)
part one | part two | part three | notes & acknowledgments | master post

Lingering in the Golden Gleam

ii.

That doesn't mean he doesn't think about it.

Jared doesn't really know how this alternative universe thing works. Is the whole thing just a figment of his imagination, or has he actually taken the place of an actual other version of himself? Is that Jared stuck in L.A. right now, trying to figure out how to get back to Jensen and his kids? It's making Jared's brain hurt just to think about it.

If there really is another version of him out there, though, Jared really can't fuck up his life by cheating on Jensen. Chad was right to make him promise not to do that.

The other stuff, though. About his and Jensen's sex life. He hadn't wanted to think about it before, but that's why he'd jumped on Katherine Wortham's flirtation so quickly. Not that he wouldn't have done it anyway, probably, had he met her back in his ordinary life, but today it's just—he spent fifteen minutes kissing another man in the shower this morning. And okay, it's Jensen; it's not like it was any random guy, but the thing is that he liked kissing Jensen, more than he's ever liked kissing, well, anyone.

Most of the people he's dated or fucked haven't really been that into kissing. It never bothered him much; he never really stopped to think about it. Sandy, for instance, didn't mind kissing, so long as they weren't both standing up. He had to be sitting on a couch or something, to make up for the height difference. When they were having sex, she hardly ever kissed him; she liked to have sex and be done with it. And the other women he's slept with—some of them liked kissing, sure, but it was always part of foreplay. This morning in the shower with Jensen, it hadn't been like that. They'd just been kissing for the sake of kissing, because kissing felt good. Jared can't remember the last time he just made out with someone without the promise of something more; probably not since high school.

But the something more? He's thinking about it now. It kind of freaks him out, but he's thinking about it. Jensen makes chicken parmesan for dinner, and Jared watches Jensen's hands as he shifts the breaded chicken around in the skillet, as he cuts the food into little pieces for Josh.

"We don't want you putting the entire thing in your mouth all at once again, do we, buddy?" Jensen says. "Why don't we want that?"

"Because choking is bad," Annie pipes up.

Jensen points in her direction and nods. "Exactly. Listen to your sister, there, Josh. She's a smart kid."

Josh gleefully stuffs five little pieces of chicken in his mouth while Jensen isn't looking anyway. For a moment Jared's worried—because like, Josh might not actually be his kid, but that's probably not going to be that convincing an argument if Jared knowingly lets him choke—but then Josh spits the half-gnawed chicken back on his plate and giggles, and everything's fine.

Jared and Jensen do the dishes together after dinner while Annie carefully explains why Maggie can't have people food to Josh. "She has to eat her dog food because otherwise it'll make her tummy upset and them she'll throw up on the rug and Daddy will have to clean it up."

Josh nods solemnly in response.

"Do you think he actually has any idea what she's saying?" Jared asks before he can think better of it.

Jensen shrugs, his hands submerged in the soapy water. "I figure just because he isn't talking doesn't mean he doesn't know exactly what we're saying. Your sister didn't start talking until really late, did she?"

"Fair enough," Jared says. "And her first word was 'poopface.'"

Jensen snorts. "Yeah, I remember you telling me."

Jared nearly writes it off as one more thing he doesn't know about being here, but then he remembers: that was something he told Jensen back when they were filming Supernatural, something that actually happened for him too. Somehow the thought of it makes him grin stupidly. "You remember what her second word was?"

"'Snot-rag,'" Jensen supplies immediately, handing Jared the frying pan to dry. "I can only hope that Josh will reach for such heights."

"Yeah, me too," Jared says, putting the pan in the drawer under the stove and muttering, "Poopface."

It feels surprisingly normal, the whole thing: doing the dishes with Jensen, bantering with him. And maybe it's just that that's something they used to do before in this same house: order in a bunch of food and watch football and get enough plates dirty that Jensen would make him help do the dishes afterwards because, "Seriously, man, Roseanne has enough to clean up after with the dogs, so you really don't need to go leaving dishes in there for a week on top of that, and I know that's what you'd do."

Maybe that's all there is to it, the familiarity of it, but the feeling doesn't go away even as they're putting the kids to bed. And afterwards, Jensen says, "Hey, you ready for bed?"

And it feels pretty close to normal to say, "Yeah, sure," and follow him into the bedroom.

Once they get into the bedroom, it stops feeling normal: Jensen kisses his mouth and pushes him down onto the bed. Jared's always had a thing for tall women—which might, in retrospect, explain something of why it didn't work out with Sandy—but none of the women he's been with were strong, really, definitely not strong enough to control him. Jensen, on the other hand? He's straddling him and working Jared's fly open while kissing him and Jared's about to call time-out, really he is, when Jensen starts sliding back down to the floor.

"You want me to suck you?" Jensen says, looking up at Jared and taking his bottom lip between his teeth.

Want cuts through Jared's stomach. "You want to suck me?" He can't actually remember the last time anyone straight-up offered to give him head. "I'm not exactly, uh. Small."

"Really," Jensen says dryly. "I had no idea." He works Jared's jeans and boxers down and touches Jared's dick.

"I mean it," Jared says, trying to keep his voice steady while Jensen pulls him a couple of times, lazily. "You seriously want to suck me?"

"Fuck, yeah," Jensen says. "Dude, you know I love it." He shifts forward on his knees and licks the head of Jared's dick, then takes it into his mouth. He sucks hard and concentrates his tongue on the underside and runs his fingers on the smooth skin behind Jared's balls.

"Oh holy shit," Jared gasps, bucking off the bed. He doesn't think he's actually capable of forming sentences. It's just—Jesus Christ, if he'd known there were going to be blowjobs? He would have been on board with this whole thing a hell of a lot faster. Because yeah, he's gotten blowjobs before, but not frequently and never voluntarily. With Sandy, sure, he got it—she had a tiny mouth, death by choking didn't sound that fun—but Jensen doesn't seem to have that problem. He's taking Jared most of the way down, and he's gripping the base of Jared's dick with his free hand. Jared can't seem to keep his hips from moving but Jensen's going with it; he can take it.

Jensen's other hand is still playing with the skin behind his balls, which would freak Jared out if it weren't for the fact that Jensen's doing something fucking amazing with his tongue right now and sucking harder than Jared would have actually thought was possible for anything but one of those really expensive vacuum cleaners, and Jared doesn't know how much longer he's going to be able to survive at all, let alone keep from coming.

Jared taps Jensen's shoulder to warn him, but he just tightens his grip around Jared's dick and somehow sucks even harder and keeps his mouth on Jared's dick while he comes. Jared doesn't think he's shot this hard since he was in high school. Jensen swallows but he doesn't get nearly all of it—there's come on his chin and his face and even his chest—and Jared's going to apologize for it, except then Jensen says, "I knew there was a reason I kept you around," and fucking licks his chin, and if it were possible to come again right now, Jared probably would have just done it.

"Jesus Christ, you're good at that," Jared says wonderingly, flopping backwards on the bed.

"And we now have conclusive proof that coming makes you stupid. I didn't even deep-throat you!"

Jared nearly falls off the bed. "You can deep-throat?"

Jensen sighs. "See? Conclusive proof." He crawls up beside Jared on the bed. Somehow he's managed to get out of his clothes in the meantime. Jared feels weird having a shirt on when Jensen's naked. He pulls it off and drops it on the floor, and that's when Jensen says, "Hey, grab the lube out of the nightstand, would you?"

A second ago Jared would have sworn he wasn't going to be able to move for a couple of hours or possibly a year, but at that he's moving pretty damned fast. "Lube," he says. "As in—"

"As in, it's my turn," Jensen says, grinning wickedly. "Don't try and fool me, man. I know you, and I know you want it."

Jared freezes. "I, uh. Um. Do you think we can maybe do something else instead?" Because yeah, Jared just came; it's not fair to think that that's the end of it, although maybe that's what he'd been thinking. Maybe he can get away with just jerking Jensen off, but something from the way Jensen's looking at him makes him think that maybe he's not going to get away with that.

"Uh, sure?" Jensen says, although it looks like that's not really what he means at all.

"Let me just—can I suck you?" As soon as the words are out of his mouth, Jared wants to take them back; but Jensen just gave him a blowjob, and as much as it's making him want to panic, fair is fair. And it doesn't involve getting fucked up the ass, which is really more than Jared can deal with right this second.

"Sure," Jensen says. He still looks a little puzzled, but Jared's not going to worry about that right now. It's a big bed, so when Jensen backs against the headboard and cants his hips up, there's plenty of room for Jared to stretch out on his stomach and breathe down on Jensen's dick. It's smaller than his own but it's still pretty big and it's wide and red, and suddenly Jared has a far greater appreciation for Sandy's hesitation in giving blowjobs. He swallows and licks lightly against the tip.

"God, are you trying to kill me here with the teasing?" Jensen says.

"Sorry," Jared says, and licks again, a little harder. There's some precome leaking out already; it's salty and not entirely unpleasant but also it's come, and oh God, he's about to suck a dick.

"Fucking do it already," Jensen bites out.

When Jared was a kid, his cousins used to have a lake house in Arkansas that they drove up to sometimes. It wasn't a big lake, but it had a tire swing that you could grab onto and swing out and hit the water flying from ten feet up. He and Jeff and Megan and their cousins used to spend hours out there, trying to see who could get the best cannonball or jackknife. It was hardly ever Jared; he was too gangly for it, especially when he was a kid and couldn't really keep control of his limbs. The thing about that lake, though, was that no matter how hot it got outside, and no matter how many times you'd already jumped off the tire swing that day, the water never stopped being completely fucking freezing. There was nothing for it but to jump in, though, jump and fight against the icy prickling of the water until you got enough control over your body to swim. Waiting never made it any better, only built the anticipation up until it got to be almost too much to take—and it's like that now, staring down Jensen's dick and thinking about it too hard.

Jared takes it into his mouth and sucks.

It's less weird than he'd have thought it would be. It doesn't feel like anything other than flesh in his mouth—flesh in the shape of a dick, yeah, but when he licks around the head Jensen makes sputtering noises and it's pretty hot. Okay, it's really hot. Jared's supposed to have a sexuality crisis over that, he thinks, except he's already got a dick in his mouth, so maybe it's a little late.

So he goes with it. He sticks a couple fingers in his mouth next to Jensen's dick, gets them wet with spit and reaches down to touch Jensen's balls. He's pretty sure that Jensen actually has bigger balls than he does, which is really not fair—Jared's a good three inches taller than he is, at least, and his dick's definitely bigger—but whatever, Jared's reasonably sure that if he's in a world where he and Jensen are married, they've probably already had the size conversation enough to last them a lifetime.

Jensen's really working his hips right now, but Jared's doing an okay job of taking it. He only gags when the tip of Jensen's dick hits his throat, but that doesn't stop either of them for long. And then Jensen's breath goes even more ragged than before and he says, "Gonna come," and Jared means to swallow, he does, but Jensen thrusts when he isn't ready for it and slips out of Jared's mouth a little and comes all over Jared's face instead.

Incongruously, Jensen starts laughing. "Man, are we roleplaying now? Because that was a pretty good impression of a first time."

Jared's flushing, but he's pretty sure it's impossible to tell under all the come. "Is there a towel or something?"

"Oh, shut up," Jensen says, pulling Jared onto the bed and licking the come off Jared's face.

Jared's a little distracted by that for a while, but then he remembers: "Wait, we roleplay?"

Jensen looks at him and grins wickedly, but the tips of his ears are definitely a little red. "I don't know what else you want to call the garter belt and corset," he says.

"Oh Jesus Christ," Jared says in a small voice.

"Yeah. That was a good anniversary."

"Uh-huh," Jared says weakly.

Jensen shifts up against Jared's side, grabs his face and tilts it down to kiss him. Jensen's mouth tastes like come. Jared doesn't actually mind. They kiss lazily for a long time, mouths moving against each other, until Jared realizes Jensen's kind of been letting him do all the work for a while. He opens his eyes: Jensen's already asleep. Jared smiles against his mouth and shifts around until the duvet is over them both, then pulls Jensen closer to him and closes his eyes again.

*

When Jared wakes up, Jensen is rocking slowly against his thigh. Jared opens his eyes, breathing out slowly, and Jensen grins at him without a trace of shame.

"Hey," he says, kissing Jared's neck. "We've probably got time to have sex right now. The alarm hasn't—"

The buzzer sounds before Jared's panic can fully build. He's never been so grateful for an alarm clock in his life.

"Never mind." Jensen sighs, and rolling out of bed and getting in the shower.

Jared doesn't think he breathes regularly again until he's in Josh's room, changing his diaper while Annie looks on. "You have to take the paper off the sticky part first," Annie says, pointing.

"Right," Jared says. The diaper sticks a lot better after that. Jared knew about that part of changing a diaper before; he's just a little distracted this morning, right, because last night he gave Jensen a blowjob to keep Jensen from fucking him up the ass, and this morning Jensen wanted to try it again, and he's sort of starting to run out of excuses. Oh God, he's pretty sure he's not supposed to be even thinking about sex around the kids, regardless of the fact that he's thinking about how he doesn't want it, because kids should never have to think about their parents having sex, and the fact that he never actually walked in on his parents is one of the single greatest things about his childhood—

And he gets a brilliant idea. "Hey Annie," he says, holding Josh upright so he can get his pants back on. "Do you ever have bad dreams and go and sleep with Daddy and Papa?"

"I used to," Annie says, "but I don't anymore, but I'm a big girl now, and Daddy said that big girls sleep in their beds the whole night."

Jared has never hated himself so much as he does right at the moment. Or rather, the other version of himself who thought that convincing a four-year-old that not interrupting sex was a good idea. "Do you ever still sleep in their room?"

Annie frowns. "No."

Jared bounces Josh against his side. "Do you think you could tonight anyway, though? As a favor to me?"

"I don't know," Annie says slowly. "I mean, Daddy said—"

"I know what your daddy said, and look, usually you should listen to what your daddy says, I'm sure he's right, but could you please do this for me? Just this once?" Annie isn't looking particularly convinced. He wonders if maybe he could get Josh to do it, but Josh is two years old and still not speaking, so it's not like he's really going to get any confirmation from him. In a fit of desperation Jared adds, "I'll get you ice cream if you do this. Please, Annie?"

Annie considers. "With sprinkles?"

Jared nearly drops Josh, he's so relieved. "Yes, with sprinkles. It can have like a million sprinkles and be in a waffle cone and whatever you want, as long as you come sleep in our room tonight."

Annie giggles. "You're silly."

Jared's not about to argue with the kid who just saved his ass—literally—so he just says, "Yep. You ready for school?"

"Josh should get ice cream too," Annie says. "So it's fair."

Josh grins like he understands.

"Sure," Jared says. "Ice cream for all! Get your backpack."

*

While Jensen's putting Josh to bed that night, Jared leans in to whisper to Annie, "You remember what to do, right?"

"Why are we whispering?" Annie says, too loudly.

"Because it's a secret," Jared says. "You always whisper when you're talking about secrets."

"Oh, okay." Annie nods sagely.

"So wait like fifteen minutes and then come in our room, okay?" Jared says.

"Okay."

Jared sort of pats her on the shoulder and goes into the bedroom. Jensen's already in bed, reading a script Jared's reasonably sure is Fiddler on the Roof—the drama department's spent the entirety of winter break trying to figure out which musical they're going to perform in the spring, Jared was able to get that out of the dinner conversation without actually making a fool of himself—he should have worked for the CIA instead of becoming an actor, he's so stealthy. It looks like Jensen's settling in for a while with the script; he's got his glasses on and everything. Jared might have been worrying a little too much about the whole sex issue.

When he gets out of the bathroom, though, Jensen puts the script down immediately and says, "Hey, get over here."

Jared goes. He crawls over the bed to Jensen and lets Jensen kiss him—kisses him back even, because kissing, that's fine, that's not getting fucked up the ass. And even when Jensen slides his boxers down, that's okay. Jensen might just want blowjobs. But when Jensen starts fumbling around in the bedside drawer again, Jared's not feeling quite so awesome about this. His pulse is spiking way about normal and he can't really breathe and if Annie fell asleep instead of coming in here, he's— Well, it's not like he can punish her for this or anything, but damn it, the idea of the look on Jensen's face when Jared tries to get out of this again . . .

Jensen comes up with the lube and condom, triumphant, at the exact moment that Annie says, "Daddy? Papa? I can't sleep."

Jensen sighs and shuts the drawer again.

"Come here, honey," Jared says, successfully resisting the urge to pump the air with his fist in relief. "What's the matter?"

"I had a nightmare," she says, climbing onto the bed and snuggling against his side. She's got just the right sleepy look, like she might have actually really fallen asleep and had a nightmare in the past twenty minutes. The kid is good.

To look at Jensen, you wouldn't have any idea the guy had seemed frustrated as hell a couple minutes ago. "You want to talk about it?" he asks, stroking her hair. He does it just the way he'd done for Jared a couple nights ago on the couch; it's an odd sensation in his stomach, knowing exactly how good that feels against his head.

"I don't remember what happened," Annie says. "I just know it was bad."

"Okay," Jared says. "You can sleep here tonight. We'll make sure nothing happens to you."

"Okay," Annie says sleepily, burrowing against him. Within a couple minutes she's fast asleep, a warm weight on Jared's side, and Jensen removes his hand from her head. It doesn't wake her.

"I think she's really asleep," Jensen whispers.

"Yeah," Jared says. The pillow's starting to feel pretty good to him too, like he could sink his head down into it and not roll over all night long.

"Great. You want to help me move her?"

"What?" Jared hisses, alarmed. "No! We might wake her up!"

There's a short silence in which it's clear that Jensen's frustration is mounting again. "Dude, you know she sleeps like the dead once she's actually asleep. Come on, let's do this already."

"She hasn't slept in here in ages," Jared counters. "Can't we just let her stay here? Just once?"

Jensen sits up on his elbow and looks at him. Jared tries to make his expression as innocent as possible. "It's totally not fair of you to use the puppy eyes." Jensen sighs and lies back down. Jared knows he's safe even before Jensen says, "Fine, one last time."

Jared sleeps well that night, even though he wakes up with half the blankets kicked off the bed. Annie's like a tiny human furnace on his side.

*

When Jared says he's tired the next night, Jensen looks at him like he's sprouted a pair of antlers. "Are you coming down with something?" Jensen asks.

"Not that I'm aware of?" It comes out as more of a question than anything else. "Why?"

"Oh, I don't know, because the last time you didn't want to have sex, you ended up in the hospital with pneumonia, maybe? Let me know if this is starting to sound familiar." The frustration coloring Jensen's voice is way stronger than it was last night, and Jared's really starting to feel a little guilty. But like, nowhere near guilty enough to want Jensen to fuck him up the ass.

"I think I'm fine," Jared insists. "Really. I'm just tired."

"All right," Jensen sighs, and rolls over. His voice is kind of muffled from the other side of the bed, but Jared can still hear him muttering under his breath—things like, "Emergency room," and, "Three a.m.," and, "If he wakes me up in the middle of the night because he can't breathe, I'm going to fucking kill him."

Jared's pretty sure he's joking—Jensen really would take him to the emergency room if he weren't breathing at three a.m., he's certain of that—but there's an undercurrent of worry in his voice too, one that Jared can't quite pin down.

So it's sort of a relief in the morning when Jared wakes up and feels like he's going to die.

*

Jensen's definitely not going to be trying to have sex with him when he's like this, his nose massively runny, his breathing all wheezy and his head feeling like it's the size of a blimp. So yeah, it's really kind of nice, except for the part where he feels like he's going to die. Also, the implication that refusing sex leads directly to life-threatening illness is fairly disturbing; and up to this point, completely untested, Jared realizes. He doesn't think he's ever refused sex before in his life, except for maybe once at a WB Christmas party when he was eighteen and he'd been really drunk and hadn't actually realized it was an offer until after the fact, so it totally doesn't count—and anyway, he'd spent the whole next day ridiculously hung-over, so that was kind of like life-threatening illness, and seriously, if deathly illness is what he's going to get for refusing sex, he's totally never doing that again. Unless it's sex that involves a dick in his asshole, in which case a little West Nile is probably fine.

"I seriously doubt it's West Nile," Jensen says, checking the thermometer he just stuck in Jared's ear. "Isn't that spread by mosquitoes? I don't know if you noticed, but it's January right now. I don't think there are too many of them still around."

"There could be rogue mosquitoes," Jared insists.

"Mmm-hmm." Jensen taps at the thermometer. "You've only got a temperature of 101. If you had West Nile it'd be like, 106 at least."

"If I have a temperature of 106, I'd be dead," Jared moans.

"Most likely," Jensen agrees, way too cheerfully. "Don't worry, I doubt you've got West Nile. It's probably just the flu."

"As in the same flu that millions of people caught during World War I and they died?"

"Medicine has advanced a little in the past hundred years," Jensen says. "You're not going to die."

Jensen takes the day off work anyway, and asks Chad and Sophia if they can watch the kids. "I don't want them catching West Nile virus," Jensen says, his mouth upturned at the edges. "You're not going to die in the next fifteen minutes while I'm taking them over there, are you?"

Jared snots what feels like half his brain into a Kleenex. "I hope not." His voice sounds like it's coming from underwater.

"I'll be back soon," Jensen says. He leans over like he's going to kiss Jared, but thinks better of it halfway through and touches his hand to Jared's forehead instead, then goes.

When Jared wakes up again, Jensen's sprawled on the bed beside him and he's got golf on the TV. "Do people even play golf in January?" Jared rasps. He pretty much feels like he just tried to swallow a golf ball, and it's stuck halfway down his throat. Which is also full of mucus.

"It's ESPN Classic," Jensen explains. "How're you feeling?"

Jared burrows deeper into the pillows in response. The closer to the bed he gets, the less he feels like his head might explode. "If I never move again," Jared says, with great effort, "it would still be too soon."

"You hungry?"

"Oh God, no. I don't think I can swallow." He's buried so deeply in the pillows that he's not sure Jensen will be able to understand him, but somehow he does.

"You should drink something, at least. Keep you from wasting away to nothing. If I make you some Gatorade, will you drink it?"

"Ulgh," Jared says.

A few minutes later, though, Jensen's back with a glass of Gatorade made with way too much powder, just the way Jared likes it. Jared manages to down most of the glass before he sinks into sleep again.

*

Jared wakes up once in the middle of the night to Jensen's fingers brushing the sweaty hair off his forehead. He thinks he hears Jensen whisper, "I love you," but Jared's still half-asleep; he can't be sure.

*

The next morning the lump lodged in Jared's throat feels closer to the size of a cherry tomato than a golf ball, and he's pretty sure he'll be good to move again in another month or so as opposed to never. So hey, that's an improvement. Jensen still insists on taking a second day off. It's not until ten or so that Jared realizes the kids aren't around, which says a lot about how sick he is.

"Don't worry, they're still with Chad and Sophia," Jensen says.

"You sure they don't mind keeping the kids this long?" Jared doesn't remember his parents ever being really sick, but he's pretty sure that if they were, they would have kept them around rather than farming them out to the neighbors.

"Are you kidding? Sophia practically begged me to let them stay. School doesn't start for another week. She's bored out of her mind."

"What do you mean, school doesn't start?"

"The sickness has addled your mind," Jensen says sadly. "You'd think you could remember Sophia's an elementary school librarian since she's been one for the past seven years. Anyway, she'll be able to keep Chad from showing them too much South Park. Probably."

It takes Jared a minute to recover from the fact that Chad is married to a hot librarian. Like, she wasn't a librarian when Chad met her, but still. Hot librarian. "South Park is a totally legit kids' show," Jared says. "It's a cartoon!"

Jensen just gives him the eyebrow.

"They need to see it for cultural awareness!" Jared argues.

"You know, no matter how many times you say that, it's not going to get any more convincing," Jensen says. He's smiling a little, though. Jared bets Jensen lets him get away with showing the kids South Park all the time. It's kind of reassuring to know that he's used the same argument before. Or rather, that the other version of him has used it.

It's weird to think about the line between him and the other version of him: how he is married to Jensen, here, but he also isn't—he still knows all about his other life, in which he never had any idea that he could be Jensen's husband or Annie and Josh's dad—and all of a sudden he's overwhelmed by the urge to come clean, to tell Jensen all of it.

Jared's quiet for a long moment, and then he says slowly, "Hey Jensen, do you ever feel like this maybe . . . I don't know, isn't your life?"

He can feel Jensen shifting onto his elbow beside him, to take a better look at him. "What do you mean?"

Jared keeps his eyes fixed on the ceiling. I mean I'm not your husband. He thinks it and intends to say it but finds, somehow, that he can't do it. He can't say that out loud. "I mean, after Supernatural ended, is this where you saw us, ten years down the road? It's just—sometimes it doesn't seem real."

Jensen laughs. "What, that we're married with kids in Vancouver? A drama teacher and a weatherman? Yeah, I think I know what you mean."

Jared just waits in the hopes that Jensen will keep talking. And sure enough, Jensen continues, "I wonder what would have happened if either of us had landed a big role and gotten famous—like, really famous. Couldn't walk down the street without being recognized, that kind of famous. Because it could have gone that way, you know? You were good, man. You could have been huge."

Yeah, Jared knows. He knows that way too well. "But I didn't get huge," he says, rolling so he can see Jensen's face.

"No," Jensen says, tracing a line along Jared's arm. "You didn't. You remember how it went?"

He gives Jared long enough to say, "Yeah," if he wanted to—if he did remember how it had gone—but Jared doesn't say it.

"You flew down to L.A. the week after the show ended," Jensen says. "You were going to ask Sandy to marry you. You'd been together for nearly seven years, and you'd bought the ring and everything—"

"The little diamond on the platinum band, because she didn't want anything fancy," Jared says — because he knows that, because that part happened for him, too.

"Yeah," Jensen says. His fingers have moved farther down to Jared's arm, moving over the fine bones of his wrist. "You got all the way down there, and you took her to the restaurant in the Getty at sunset, you remember? We'd spent all that time going through the different ways you could propose—all that goofy shit you were thinking of—and you'd finally decided you were just going to go for traditional, get down on one knee and pop the question. So you sat all the way through appetizers and salad and the main course and right before dessert, you finally got down on one knee—" Jared remembers everything up to this point, remembers it perfectly well.

"And you broke up with her," Jensen finishes.

"I got all the way down on one knee and I broke up with her," Jared says.

"Yup," Jensen says. "You'd rented that house in Malibu and everything and you'd packed up a bunch of shit and took the dogs. You said you were going to stay for a week or so and then you were going to come back to Vancouver and figure out what to do from there, and it was kind of crazy, but I swear I thought you were going to go to L.A. and you weren't ever going to come back and you were going to, I don't know, hire a cleaning service to pack up your house and I wasn't ever going to hear from you again except for like, a phone call on my birthday or something."

Jared doesn't tell him that, in a world that isn't this one, that's exactly how it happened. He doesn't say that he asked Sandy to marry him and that she said yes, or that he called Jensen pretty often for the first few weeks, but then he landed his first big role, and it shot on location in Argentina, and he didn't call Jensen once after that for nearly six months. He doesn't say that he and Sandy stayed engaged for another two years before she broke up with him for a photographer she met through her modeling, and he doesn't say that long before she broke up with him, he'd had a pretty good idea it was coming. He doesn't say that in the eight years since then, he has no idea how many women he's slept with, but he can count on one hand the number of women he's been with more than once.

Jared doesn't say any of that. What he says is, "That's not what happened, though."

Jensen smiles at him. "No, it isn't. You came back."

Jared wants him to say more. He wants him to explain what happened after that, how they went from being friends to being married with kids—he's greedy for the details. He wants to say that there's no fucking way it was as simple as him coming back to Vancouver and them getting together, just like that. But Jensen is smiling at him, not so much tracing lines on Jared's arm anymore as just letting his hand rest on top of Jared's, and maybe it was that simple. Maybe in this world, it was.

*

Jared doesn't sleep nearly as much that afternoon as he did the day before. He actually feels okay enough around four that he sits up and watches the second Die Hard for a while. About halfway through Jensen gets up and cooks soup. It's chicken noodle, with the noodles mushed down to the point that he doesn't even have to put up the pretense of chewing them, and it's so good he might actually cry.

Jensen hits him with an elephant-sized dose of Nyquil with codeine afterwards, and Jared doesn't wake up again until Jensen's alarm goes off at 6:30 a.m.

"Hey," Jensen says, rolling over sleepily. "How're you doing now?"

Jared breathes in experimentally. His throat feels like it might be able to handle something quasi-solid, like, say, tacos—God, he could go for some tacos right now—and when he shifts upright in bed, his head doesn't actually feel like it's going to explode immediately. "Huh," Jared says. "Kind of better."

"'Kind of better'? As in, it's safe for me to go to work and for the kids to come back tonight? Or 'kind of better' as in, you could probably take a shower today without collapsing to the floor? Which, by the way, I really recommend that you do, because when was the last time you showered?"

Jared tries to count days and fails. "Huh. I'm not sure."

"Yeah, I know," Jensen says grimly. "I can smell your uncertainty."

"You're hilarious," Jared says, hitting his arm. "So I'll take a shower later."

"The entire world says thank you."

Jared flips him the finger, but Jensen's already out of bed and in the bathroom, so it's somewhat less effective than he would have liked. He follows Jensen down to the kitchen for breakfast after Jensen finishes getting dressed, and gnaws on a piece of wheat bread and more Gatorade while Jensen eats cereal. Tacos would have been way better.

"So I think it's probably safe for you to go to work," Jared says, somewhat reluctantly.

"I sort of guessed that," Jensen says. "Although I also like to get dressed for work and then hang out around the house. You know, for fun."

"I'm going to call you every fifteen minutes today," Jared says. "And tell you that I'm dying."

"Have fun drowning in your own mucus when I stop picking up after the second call." Jensen leans across the table and kisses Jared on the forehead.

Jared scrunches up his face. "I bet you're infected now."

"If I haven't caught it yet, I figure I'm probably safe," Jensen says. "And I mean, if we both die, I bet Chad and Sophia would keep the kids."

"South Park marathons forever!" Jared yells, fist-pumping, and Jensen laughs on his way out the door.

*

Jared spends the rest of the day discovering that the only thing worse than being deathly ill is being sort-of ill. He doesn't feel quite good enough to go back to work, he knows that, but he does feel good enough to stay awake all day, cook himself a can of Campbell's Chunky Chicken and Rice, watch eight episodes of Law & Order: SVU and over-think the entirety of his life.

Jared doesn't remember much about that first day he was sick. He was asleep for most of the day and groggy as hell for the rest, but he remembers Jensen's fingers moving across his hair, Jensen moving the blankets off him when he tried to kick them off, feverish, and Jensen pulling them back over him in the middle of the night when the fever broke and he started to shiver. He remembers the weight of Jensen's body on the bed beside him and how good it was to know that Jensen was there. That if he stopped breathing in the night, Jensen would know it.

If he'd gotten sick in L.A., how long would it have taken anyone to notice? He's never gotten sick when he's been in L.A., but that's not the point. The point is: he has no idea how long it would be. He hangs out with lots of people, sure, he's got plenty of friends, but if he didn't show up at a club or for dinner or whatever, people would probably just figure he'd blown them off, gone to a different club with different friends. No one would think anything of it until a couple weeks down the line when someone said, "Hey, what happened to Jared?" and they'd find his half-gnawed bones on the floor of his kitchen, and he knows it's bad when he's comparing himself to Bridget Jones, but it's fucking weird to realize he's been lonely, damn it. Eight years of living the life since Sandy broke up with him, and that whole time he never even realized he was lonely.

If he's honest with himself, it goes back longer than eight years. It goes back to the end of Supernatural, the moment he flew down to L.A. to propose to Sandy and never really hung out with his best friend again until he got thrown into some alternate universe where he's married to him, and it's just. It's a weird thing to think about, and ice hockey isn't distracting him nearly enough. There should be way more fighting.

*

Jensen brings the kids home a little after five, and they all clamor onto the bed with him. "Try not to get too close to my face," Jared tells them, but Josh buries his nose in Jared's neck anyway.

They eat spaghetti for dinner and it doesn't entirely hurt to swallow, which is awesome. The kids pass right out after dinner—Chad played tag with them for an hour after he picked them up from school, Jensen says. Jensen comes into the room afterwards and presses a kiss to Jared's forehead. "Hey, you good now?"

Jared is and he isn't. There's something squirming in his stomach that might build into the need to vomit. It isn't part of the flu and he doesn't know what it means, and so he says, "Good, but not a hundred percent better, you know?"

And Jensen says, "Yeah, I know." He kisses Jared's cheek and picks up a book and starts reading, and Jared's pretty sure he should be talking to Jensen about something, only he has no real idea what, and the thought of talking to Jensen is making the potential vomiting more urgent. So instead he rolls over onto his side and spends a very long time not falling asleep.

*

part one | part two | part three | notes & acknowledgments | master post